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P4 2.2GHz Overclocked to 3.5GHz

GraveD sent linkage to a site explaining how a homemade nitrogen cooling system overclocked a P4 from 2.2Ghz to an incredible 3.5ghz. There's plenty of stuff to poke at over there. Update: 01/17 20:42 GMT by T : boaworm writes: "According to this paper, the Finnish geeks have successfully oveclocked a Pentium 4 to 3675 Mhz. They claim it is a new World Record, and it sure looks like they beaten another O/C'd Pentium 4 submitted earlier today on slashdot. (Summary in English in the end)."

17 of 620 comments (clear)

  1. Would this qualify under by ViceClown · · Score: 3, Insightful
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  2. I'd like to know... by Sawbones · · Score: 3, Insightful

    given the many discussions on /. of late re: full disclosure of security holes, partial disclosure, disclosure to the company only, etc - what does the crowd here think of the way these exploits have been handled? The story says the Litchfield has commented publicly and explicitly on the nature of one of the holes that already has a patch available, but that he's holding close the holes that have patches still under development.

    I guess another question would be, while Oracle is by no means a small company, if the company name started with an M and ended with 'icrosoft' would we be demanding more information?

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  3. Re:does anyone actually expose the DB to the world by The+Man · · Score: 4, Insightful
    Of course we would hope people would not expose the database to the world, but there are plenty of people who do. And more interestingly, the database is usually exposed to some internal networks (for example, a database for financials might sit well inside a firewall in the accounting department - on a corporate network). So there is still risk at least from people who can compromise firewalls, bypass poor security checks in applications, or from disgruntled employees.

    The fact that defense in depth is a good idea does not justify allowing one of the layers to be weak. The defenses at every level should be as strong as possible, and that ideally means a bug-free app server and a bug-free database.

  4. Nobody bothered to read the challenge... by aralin · · Score: 5, Insightful
    Apparently nobody bothered to read the Oracle challenge. Oracle states that not the database itself, but the database in certain environment, properly configured and secured within the environment is unbreakable, which still is.

    The only thing that this researcher proved is that in certain environments you can break in the system, which basicly holds true for every system.

    No matter what, you can be sure that contrary to M$, these holes will be worked on 24/7 and fixed like yesterday. :)

    Anyway, enjoy you uninformed, senseless bashing and flaming... trolls.

    --
    If programs would be read like poetry, most programmers would be Vogons.
    1. Re:Nobody bothered to read the challenge... by dgoodman · · Score: 3, Insightful
      And of course those certain environments and configurations would be:
      • Unplugged from any network
      • Unplugged from any power source
      Otherwise there will be some hole to exploit...one cannot expose features without also exposing some vulnerability (be it only social hacking)
  5. Marketing at work, that's all. by mystery_bowler · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The reality of it is that most DBAs, programmers and database developers in the working world scoffed at the ad campaign the moment it began. Sure, Oracle has a great product, but we all knew it wasn't bulletproof, no matter how may awards for "best of class security" it supposedly won.

    The only real losers in this, other than organizations whose Oracle databases were victimized by a security flaw, were the corporate purchasers who were sold on the hype. They'll have to live with the fact that their DBMS isn't "unbreakable." Honestly, though, there are relatively few of those (none I can think of that are well-publicized, at least), as they are usually run on well locked-down *nix boxes.

    It's not anything new. It's just agressive advertising. Some might argue that it's false advertising, but that's probably being a bit harsh. It's more like...overly boastful advertising.

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    My sigs always suck.
  6. Quote the Security Manager? by Havokmon · · Score: 4, Insightful

    As if ANYONE on this site hasn't ever had to explain something that a some moron ^H^H^H^H^H^H manager said could or couldn't be done..

    HIS boss is still the boss, wtf is he supposed to say?

    --
    "I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
  7. It was a marketing ploy by nzhavok · · Score: 3, Insightful

    It was a marketing ploy and any professional administator who looked at and said "wow, unbreakable, lets buy it" probably wasn't a professional at all.

    It's not surprising that a system as complex as Oracle is going to have security flaws. However if you mistaken believed that Oracle had created the perfect piece of software, may I suggest you stow it away in the closet next to your Abdominizer and set of stay-sharp-steak-knives.

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    He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
  8. To paraphrase an old koan: by mblase · · Score: 4, Insightful

    A software company said to the public, "Our product is unbreakable." The public replied, "No, you are not unbreakable."

    Another software company said to the public, "Our product is not unbreakable." And the public replied, "You're right, you are not unbreakable."

  9. Liability by JabberWokky · · Score: 4, Insightful
    I brought up the topic of Liability for software bugs with my Dad (he's a VP at one of the big banks). He replied that the current software companies would be "shot in the street". Now, I was confused until he explained: "Shot in the Street" simply means that the public and government would turn on them so hard legally that they would be driven out of business. Sure, some people would have legitimite grounds for a lawsuit, but most would be pressing legal action for their "piece of the pie". The companies (we were discussing MS in particular) wouldn't even have the *option* of beefing up QA and addressing the issues.

    The more I've thought about this, the more likely it seems. And a key aspect to this is that my OS vendor, SuSE, and ilk (Red Hat, Mandrake, etc) would be nailed just as much as MS, except with less money in the bank, they would be killed much more swiftly. Now, two of those are outside of the USA, so it's not a direct correlation, but there are some serious ramifications to software liability that occur in as reactive a society as we have today.

    Certainly this announcement would instantly have a dozen law firms seeking people running Oracle to launch a multi-billion dollar suit of some flavor. And while certainly not "unbreakable", and (IMO) a bit overpriced, Oracle being available is a Good Thing. Of course they have holes. I'm equally sure that they will likely address them quickly (Quickly being relative to the company involved). Introducing *sane* liability (at least in America) is going to be very difficult in a society that is making it neigh impossible to be a medical doctor, and is driving up medical costs due to the extensive CYA documentation (videotapes, extensive reports, etc) now required by industry insurance.

    --
    Evan "I'm pretty sure this is ontopic" E.

    --
    "$30 for the One True Ring. $10 each additional ring!" -- JRR "Bob" Tolkien
  10. irony by trb · · Score: 3, Insightful
    From the SecurityFocus article:

    But Oracle chief security officer Mary Ann Davidson says the criticism is unfair. In an emailed response to Mullen's commentary, Davidson wrote that Oracle is giving the holes reported by Litchfield the "highest priority," but suggested that everything depends on what your definition of "unbreakable" is.

    Rather than representing a literal claim that Oracle's products are impregnable, the campaign "speaks to" fourteen independent security evaluations that Oracle's database server passed, Davidson wrote, and "represents Oracle's commitment to a secure product lifecycle for our entire product suite."

    So Oracle says it's fair that they assert that their software is unbreakable when it is not, but they say it's unfair when others criticize their misleading and errant claim. What's wrong with this picture?
  11. Buffer Overflows Myth by Tom7 · · Score: 4, Insightful

    > Buffer overflow bugs can be prevented by a
    > middle-school hacker. This is elementary stuff.
    > Doesn't anybody believe in putting limits on
    > characters? This is simple to prevent.

    This is pure bullshit. Are the programmers of
    Apache, IIS, Half-Life, Quake 3 Arena, Perl, SSHD, glibc, wu_ftpd, or BIND at the middle school level? Windows NT? How about the linux kernel? All have had buffer overflows, and I'll bet that many of them still do.

    Unfortunately it is not always as simple as "putting limits on characters". The simple fact is that the C language is practically designed to make buffer overflow bugs easy to write and easy to exploit.

    I agree with you that buffer overflows are serious, though. That's why I think it is ridiculous that we still write security-critical network software in C. Sometimes it is hard to get around, like in the linux kernel when you need to do hardware access (a microkernel architecture might make it easier to write certain parts in higher-level languages). You might argue that performance would be impacted (I don't think this is true, especially with network software where the network is the real bottleneck), but even this argument falls through for 99% of users, since most users are far from full utilization of their processor. However, almost all users *are* affected by security holes.

  12. Re:Is 3.5 GHz enough? by SirSlud · · Score: 3, Insightful

    More like, if all the software available on the x86 platform didn't depend on the chipset extentions rather than the raw architechture.

    Don't confuse 'real life performance' with 'optimized for SSE/3DNOW/MMX' yadda yadda. Unfortuanetly, even though chips may be raw number crunching daemons (and Photoshop optimized for the G4 absolutely screams (maybe 33% better) over a faster clocked P4 in my first hand experience), and even though people may know that Mgz != speed, I think too many people still fail to remember that much of the percieved 'power' of certain chips come from compiler optmizations for that specific chip, not a lack of power in its competitors or an inability to turn FP and Int performance into 'real world' performance.

    --
    "Old man yells at systemd"
  13. Re:whoopie by Enrico+Pulatzo · · Score: 4, Insightful

    Can you really say that its the consumer who will win when no consumer programs require much processing power over a P2 400 or so?

    I mean, it's nice that intel and AMD can make such fast processors, but where's the bottleneck on overall performance nowadays? I'm willing to bet it's not in the chip.

    I think we've reached a point in personal computing where the software is years behind the hardware. Only in the fields of gaming or professional rendering do we need such high performance machines.

    My friend's parents recently purchased a 1.5 Ghz Pentium 4 for day to day bookkeeping!

  14. Re:Japanese only by Lxy · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I have little time to look at nothing more than a booklet of pretty pictures

    If your time is so valuable, why do you read /. in the first place?

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    There is no reasonable defense against an idiot with an agenda
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  15. Re:Compare it to an Athlon by GauteL · · Score: 3, Insightful

    The P4 also has a less advanced FPU. When it comes to RC5 I guess there aren't as many clever little tricks you can use (like SSE), as the case is in 3d-graphics, so Athlon wins on brute force since it has a much better FPU.

  16. Re:whoopie by ToLu+the+Happy+Furby · · Score: 3, Insightful

    So, this is probably how Intel demo'ed their 3.5GHz P4 last year. Shows how pointless the whole thing is, to be honest.

    No: the 3.5GHz P4 Intel demoed at IDF last fall was air-cooled. On the other hand, it was certainly hand-picked from a special run of chips on a boutique process tuned to produce a few very high clocking chips at the expense of overall yield. Which, yes, shows how pointless the whole thing is, to be honest.

    On the other hand, the fact that they are showing it off is an indication of where they're going. Intel showed of an (air-cooled) 2 GHz P4 at IDF fall '00, and launched the same part, not coincidentally, exactly at IDF fall '01. They showed a 3.5 GHz P4 at IDF fall '01, which means...?

    No, they probably won't get one out quite so early (3.0 is more like it), but it'll be here around the end of the year. Incidentally, the top speed of an air-cooled hand-picked chip on a special process is probably more relevant to future clock scaling than that of a Liquid Nitrogen cooled off-the-shelf part, for the simple reason that the process will be tweaked to be more aggressive as time goes on, but the temperature is never going to magically drop to -196 deg C. (And yes, the difference matters, as lower temperatures attack different limiting factors for clock rates than tweaked processes do.)